Sensory Perception

Prospect
The Journal of an Artist.
By Anne Truitt.
221 pp. New York:
Scribner. $22.

The personal memoir, however appealing, can be the most fleeting of forms. The good one is rich in detail, often steeped in specific personal agonies and hot issues of the day. I think of Bruce Bawer's fine delineation of a gay conservative's predicament in ''A Place at the Table'' or Susanna Kaysen's ''Girl, Interrupted'' -- a journal of mental illness. The best kind of memoir gives us more. Equally revealing of its times, it nevertheless goes beyond the moment, suggests meaning where meaning is not apparent -- as in ordinary life -- and so teaches us as much about ourselves as about its author.

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Anne Truitt's ''Prospect'' is such a memoir. Her first journal, ''Daybook,'' is talismanic. Still in print after a decade and a half, it describes an artist's discovery of her talent, her coming to terms with its demands and her struggles to balance work and love. Many of those who have read it carry its meaning with them as they travel their own paths. Now the artist returns to us late in life, offering a string for those of us still working our way through the labyrinth.

''Prospect'' was prompted, as was ''Daybook,'' by a gathering of Ms. Truitt's sculpture for a retrospective exhibit. She committed herself in 1991 to keep a journal of what she suspected would be a difficult time. Like many artists -- think of Virginia Woolf -- Ms. Truitt was anxious about the exposure of her work, her self, to strangers. ''I will be wounded,'' she says realistically. ''Although experience has shown me that critical reaction to my work runs parallel to its course, illuminates it only obliquely and does not deflect it, I have never weathered an exhibition without hurt.''

And hurt she is, though by now she knows where to find help -- friends, family and, mostly, more work. Mind you, by any measure Ms. Truitt is a successful artist. Her art -- large, abstract constructions, often of painted wood -- can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery, among others.

But there persists in her a vulnerability not healed by acclaim. And she is fearless and eloquent in examining herself on the subject. For several pages she circles what she calls the ''hollow core of success.'' The drive to achieve is sometimes an attempt to ''exorcise the stigma of parental failure,'' or success can be a ''trophy to be laid at the parents' feet.'' Then she probes her own creative drive, rooted in her intense, suppressed love for her emotionally distant parents and her longing for their approval. Suddenly comes an interesting insight about the larger art world: ''Art critics, art historians, dealers -- all who have to do with art once it is made,'' however well intentioned they are, often encounter ingratitude from artists. ''The reason may be that they are unconsciously addressing in artists an unconscious longing for which there can be no meet answer, no consolation.''

Ms. Truitt then quickly draws back to observe herself: ''The real reward of art is quintessentially immediate and private,'' its miraculous equivalent in the shock of recognition at the moment of birth. ''The phrase 'Oh, it was you' used to come into my mind when I first beheld my babies.'' If the metaphor is unoriginal, it is so real that it seems fresh again. And this is the Truitt method: circle an idea, examine oneself however uncomfortably, await the insight and bring the subject straight home.

''Prospect'' covers Anne Truitt's life over the past five years. During that time she mounts several exhibits, undergoes a health scare, a 50th Bryn Mawr reunion, mandatory retirement from teaching, economic insecurity, panic. She also drives across the continent with a young man, finishes an important painting, has a ladies' lunch with her best old friends, acknowledges her waning physical powers, spends a month at Yaddo and welcomes her fifth grandchild. It's not a wild or dramatic journey, nor does Ms.Truitt strain to make it so. The wildness is within -- her ''heavy sorrow'' and guilt, her sense of selfishness and isolation from others, the ecstasy of creativity, her tender loyalty to her family -- but, all things considered, she examines her soul pretty calmly.

The writing, consequently, is clear as a mountain stream, often quite beautiful. Her artist's eye sees the meaning -- and she then finds feeling -- in ordinary stuff, as here, where she describes the joy of wood: ''I liked its forthright look, which evoked in me the pleasure with which I had watched carpenters at their work when I was a child in Easton, Md., the small town on the peninsular Eastern Shore in which I grew up. I remembered how much I had liked wood, its resinous smell, and the long springy planed curls that the friendly carpenters used to let me hang on my all-too-straight yellow hair. I remembered the open-eyed way I had looked at things in my childhood.''

Ms. Truitt's connection to childhood -- her own, her children's, her children's children's -- binds her art and life. She likes the idea of what her friend, the critic Dore Ashton, calls ''the spaces of the imagination . . . such as the spaces of attics and cellars, of sea shell and tree, cupboards and drawers, cave and sanctuary.'' Ms. Truitt calls them ''archetypes to which we all have access. Because childhood is experienced in common, the spaces of an artist's imagination can spark comparable secret, sacred memories in a viewer. People who can receive the presence of a work of art may find themselves restored to selves they have half forgotten.''

It is this very restored self that responds to ''Prospect'' -- its memories of childhood but also its anxieties about aging, aloneness and death that we all share. Marshaling passages from and about everyone and everywhere -- Cicero, Beowulf, Darwin, Trollope, Ernest Shackleton, Garc(TM)a Lorca, Clement Greenberg -- she follows wherever her open mind, sharp eye and lively curiosity lead. At the Guggenheim Museum one day, she comes upon a painting by Ad Reinhardt that looks at first to be all black until she discovers in it a blue-black cross. The painting sparks a kind of esthetic conversion: ''The words 'Exactly like meaning in life' streaked across my mind -- 'at total risk of imperceptibility.' ''

''Prospect'' is one of those books that reveal what is at total risk of imperceptibility in one's life, lying there, waiting to be discovered.